The Life Which Is Unexamined Is Not Worth Living

Don’t Ever Lose Hope

To lose hope is something easy to do.

The bad side of everything sticks out like a sore thumb, focusing on them is not hard as they will be what capture your attention the most. As humans we inherently focus on the negative sides of things due to our evolution process. You know, if you were a cavemen then it was much more important to know if there’s a sign of saber tooth tiger nearby than how beautiful the scenery is. This made survivability of our species depends on our sensitivity on negativity and this trait ended up passed until it reaches our era. That’s why, the time when you missed your flight is more likely to be remembered than the fact that you finally made it to your destination in the end. That annoying passenger in front of you stand out more than that unexpectedly delicious meal you ate during the trip in your memory. So yes, unfortunately, being negative is a part of our nature as human being.

This negativity bias is a worst complement possible for the characteristic of our mass media contents nowadays. What we have nowadays is like torrents of bad news every single day. It’s just yesterday that a Russian passenger plane was down, killing more than 200 people inside it and it’s highly likely that it was blown away by ISIS. If it’s true then we just saw hundreds of people added to ISIS victims list which has reached millions in number. This is merely one from many problems we have in our world now. A war for territories, genocide happening to ethnic minority, people killing others in the name of racial supremacy, school bombing, terrorist running rampant in a powerless state, politician neglecting the importance of combatting climate change for the sake of pleasing their donator who happened to be oil companies. After seeing these, how can we be optimistic about future? The more we want to know the more it looks like It’s too easy to see the ugliness humanity has nowadays, it’s completely normal if you say you have lost hope in humanity at least once.

But you know, status quo is actually improving. Extreme poverty has declined so much these past decades. Some country who was struggling with poverty so much like China and India even saw a tremendous economic growth and becoming a formidable economic power now. We managed to lower child mortality rate, giving health access to poor areas in Africa, and even have some innovation that might end dangerous disease like malaria for good. More people than ever have access to education, which can be a seed for social and economic betterment for their family. In international scene, we managed to see Iran and USA finally talk it out and manage their differences regarding Iran nuclear possession by diplomacy instead of military intervention or embargo. There are many other betterment that are finally realized because there are people who fight for it, because there are people who don’t lose hope.

So my friends, don’t ever lose hope. Ignorance from all problems and sufferings in this world might be tempting. As long as we care, we’ll always be reminded of how ugly the world is. But it’s only by the works of people who haven’t lost hope, the people who choose to be reminded how bad our world is everyday and make small change one step at a time, that our world can change for the better. Losing hope means we have lost our chance to make a world a better place, would that worth the bliss we got from ignorance?